Ringing in 150: The History (and Future) of Telecommunications

Rich Miner. Rich Miner is advising and investing in a number of startups from his AngelFund exvc and with AI investment firm FactorialFunds. He has a new Stealth GenAI start-up in Cambridge launching its first product later this year. He is half time at Google where he helps leadership evolve their platforms for a future AI-enabled world. He has been at Google since the acquisition of his startup Android which he co-founded and helped grow into the world’s most popular operating system. After launching Android, Rich helped start and build GV (Google Ventures) into a world class venture capital fund. Rich’s previous company, Wildfire, built the first voice based personal assistant – a predecessor to Alexa and Google Home – which was sold to Orange where he stayed on for five years as VP of Innovation. Rich also helped start Avid Technology which created the first non-linear computer based video editing system receiving both technical Oscar and Emmy awards and going public in 1993. Rich Miner received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and the University recently formed their new School of Computer and Information Science in his name. He splits his time between Cambridge and Maine and is an active angel investor with his fund exvc.

Scott Kirsner. Scott Kirsner is columnist at MassLive and regular contributor to WBUR’s Morning Edition. Scott Kirsner has spent two decades as a business journalist and contributing editor at the Boston Globe, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Variety, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and other publications. Scott is the author of several books on innovation and technology, including a collaboration with George Lucas, Inventing the Movies, which explores the challenge of bringing new ideas to a century-old, change-resistant industry: Hollywood. His most recent book is Innovation Economy: True Stories of Startups, Flame-Outs, and Inventing the Future in New England. Scott has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Yahoo Finance, CNN, NPR’s Science Friday, the Discovery Channel, and WBUR’s Radio Boston. His latest project is co-founding a new organization, The Innovation Trail of Greater Boston. You can follow it on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn: @BostonInnoTrail, or learn more at theinnovationtrail.org

Muriel Médard. Muriel Médard is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering at MIT, where she directs the Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group. She earned her degrees at MIT and has mentored over 95 master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral researchers. Her research led to the co-founding of three companies (Optimum, CodeOn, and Nanoping) and 70 patents, most of which have been commercially licensed or acquired. She has served as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Professor Médard is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the NAI, and the IEEE. Her work has been recognized with the IEEE Kobayashi Award and honorary doctorates from TU Munich, Aalborg University, and Budapest University of Technology.